Two days after my eighth birthday my family moved up to Uranium City.
The year was 1965.
It was a weird time for this mining town. In the 1950s, the American government went on a building binge for nuclear weapons. The north shore of Lake Athabasca was one of the main areas in which Uranium had been discovered in North America – along with Elliott Lake in Ontario and part of Colorado and Nevada. The mine at Port Radium on Great Bear Lake had produced the Uranium for the Manhatton Project bombs, but it was small, remote, and expensive. Anyways, in the early and mid-1950s, the American military’s policy towards potential Uranium suppliers was, “mine it and we’ll buy it.” Mining promoters would turn a real or somewhat fanciful find into a contract to sell a specified amount of Uranium at a specified price. The contract would serve as collateral to get financing to build a mine. In less than a decade, 35 mines – large and small – had blasted holes into the Precambrian Shield around Uranium City.
Then some accountant in the American defense department added it up to discover that they had contracted to buy enough Uranium to last into the next century and to build enough bombs to blow up the world about 35 times. I’m making up the numbers, but the general point is accurate. In this, take me seriously but not literally.
The Canadian government responded by forcing a restructuring of the Uranium mining industry. A crown corporation – Eldorado – bought up most of the contracts, renegotiated the delivery schedules, and closed all the little mines. Production was consolidated at Eldorado’s main mining operation. The one exception was a bigger mine a little further away. It was called Gunnar Mines and operated until its contracts were fulfilled in 1964. At that point, Gunnar closed, leaving Eldorado as the only Uranium producer in Saskatchewan.
I didn’t know any of this as an eight-year-old. All I knew was that abandoned mines made great playgrounds. Two days after arriving, I rode my bicycle to the Cinch Lake Mine. It was great. In an office building, I found a stack of maps of the area with exciting place names such as “Goldfields.” A few weeks later, new friends showed me mining shafts that we could climb down to get blasting caps and dynamite. These were a lot more fun than the wimpy firecrackers available down south.
My point is that mine clean-up and decommissioning was – well – nonexistent. When those mines closed, people just left. For the eight-year-old me, it was great. Places to explore. Trouble to get into. Lectures at school on the dangers of playing with blasting caps seemed like an invitation rather than a warning.
But some things troubled even the eight-year-old me.
We would drive out to Milliken Lake. The road took us past a mine and a mill called Lorado. The mine seemed kind of normal. After all, there were a lot of abandoned mines in the area. The abandoned mill was a different matter. The first thing I noticed was a huge pile of Sulphur. I remember thinking that this was probably not good. My father had been hired as a high school teacher. I went with him to the school before the academic year began. The principle – a science guy – showed us his store room. It was filled with big bottles of chemicals. He proudly told us that he had salvaged them from the Lorado mill. Eight-year-old me was vaguely discomforted. I had a chemistry set and like to produce bangs and stench. I didn’t think it was necessarily a good thing that large quantities of chemicals had been abandoned.
But the big problem was the tailings. Below the Lorado mill there was a huge area of unhealthy-looking sand. Nothing grew there. It spilled into Nero Lake. I was told that there was no point in fishing in that lake. I later learned that the sand was tailings from the mill – 227,000 cubic meters covering 14 hectares. This stuff was not only radioactive – it was highly acidic. Remember that big pile Sulphur? If the mill had not closed earlier than originally expected, it would have ended up in the tailings. One key part of the milling process was called “acid leach.”
It was a few years before I got to see the site of the Gunnar Mine. Although not a huge distance from Uranium City as a crow would fly, there was no easy direct route. Gunnar had been a big operation – in the late 1950s, it was the largest Uranium mine in the world. There was an underground mine, an open pit mine, and a mill. When the mine closed, they blasted a trench from Lake Athabasca to flood the pit and the mine. Then they left. Many of the houses were hauled to Uranium City over an ice road, but 4.4 million tons of tailings were … just kind of left there. There was lots of other bad stuff left behind as well – such as 13,000 cubic feet of Sulphur and 300 barrels of toxic chemicals. We will not mention the 760,000 cubic feet of asbestos.
When these mines and mills closed, people just walked away. The Lorado mine and mill closed in 1959. The Gunnar mine and mill closed in 1964.
When did a clean-up and decommissioning begin?
2011 in the case of Lorado. If my finger count is accurate, that’s 52 years after the operation closed.
2006 in the case of Gunnar. By my count, that’s 42 years after the operation closed. Here’s something kind of spooky. For 11 of those 42 years, the abandoned Gunnar mill was converted into a fish processing plant. That’s right. Whitefish and trout were cleaned, packaged, and frozen in an abandoned Uranium mill that contained massive amounts of radioactive material, Sulphur, asbestos, and other assorted toxic chemicals.
This was considered normal.
I mentioned there were 35 mining operations around Uranium City. The Saskatchewan government reports that 20 have now received basic site remediation. That’s progress, I guess. But let’s keep in mind that I was about two years old when most of these mines closed. I am now getting Canada Pension Plan benefits.
Things have gotten better
In 2017, I got hired to teach at Keyano College in Fort MacMurray. There was an environmental science program there. Some of my colleagues were pretty hard-core environmentalist types. You know – the kind of people that wander around in swamps studying frog populations to make sure that the amphibians are healthy. I’m not mocking, merely observing.
Anyways, they took me out to areas that had once been dug up to take the oil out of the sand. To be honest, I thought I was walking through pristine wilderness. My colleagues then pointed out everything that had been done wrong – every reclamation effort that fell short of perfection. All I can say is that their eyes were more educated than mine. This was not the Lorado or Gunnar tailings dumps I was walking through.
A little later, I met with some officials from SUNCOR and SYNCRUDE. They told me of their environmental mitigation and reclamation programs. They were genuinely proud of their work, but, at the same time, harshly self-critical. They thought they were doing good but wanted to do better.
As a guy who came to consciousness in the aftermath of the 1950s Uranium boom in northern Saskatchewan, I was thinking: “This is different” and “This is better.”
A few final observations
As I talked to the folk from SUNCOR and SYNCRUDE, it was very clear that they WANTED to do things in an environmentally friendly way. At the same time, I am not completely naïve. In many cases, a corporate desire to do the right thing was … initiated by the coercive hand of the state. If you are being forced to do the right thing, then you might as well get enthusiastic about it. The psychologists call it reducing cognitive dissonance.
So, I am in favor of the heavy hand of government forcing resource extraction companies to do the right thing. Without that, they will revert to digging and walking away.
At the same time, I believe that well-intentioned regulation can go too far. The environmental impact assessment process can become more about preventing any development than about actually mitigating negative environmental effects of development. For example, in 2007 there was a major find of all sorts of minerals – including those needed to manufacture things like electric cars – in Northern Ontario. As far as I can tell, development is still hung up in the environmental impact assessment OF POTENTIAL ROADS LEADING TO THE SITE.
Yikes. Over a decade and a half to get permission to build a road?
Let me be clear. The “dig it and leave it” ethos of the past was really, really bad. An imposition of planning to deal with the long-term environmental impact of development is a good thing. We do better – a lot better – at this than we used to do. That is good.
But I once had a boss who was fond of saying that “any virtue taken to extreme becomes a vice.”
Something to contemplate.